Comedian Shane Gillis faces sexism accusations after joking on Saturday Night Live that women at gyms “dress like whores,” a bit actor Dan Levy called misogynistic and tied to assault.
During his recent monologue on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, Shane Gillis turned to a familiar target: the modern gym. The comedian told the audience he had been away from working out long enough that the dress code surprised him.
Breitbart News reported the bit and the online reaction that followed. Gillis did not soften the punchline.
"I haven’t been in the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dress like whores now."
He kept going, zeroing in on the shorts and the cameras that now follow every workout. “I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe... have you seen it? I’ve seen it. The shorts. Have you seen the shorts?” he said. Then came the warning: “And don’t look. You’re not allowed to look.” He added that he was already “in the background of, like, ten TikToks right now.”
The jokes landed with part of the audience and enraged another. Social media lit up with complaints that the monologue was sexist. One Reddit user said the material was so bad that a prior live show became unwatchable.
"My wife and I bought tickets for his Chicago show a while back and no joke we walked out in the first 15 minutes."
Other commenters piled on, calling Gillis racist, sexist, and homophobic, and asking what women are “meant to wear at the gym” if shorts draw mockery. The anger stayed online. No arrests, firings, or network punishment appeared in the immediate aftermath, only loud disapproval.
Schitt’s Creek star Dan Levy took the criticism further. In an Instagram reel he rejected the premise of the monologue outright and reframed the language as something darker than a clothing gag.
"Women wearing short shorts to the gym does not make them whores. It makes the men calling them whores misogynists."
Levy said he was “speechless that something like that can exist on live national television” and argued that more men need to oppose it. He did not stop at manners. He tied the joke to real-world crime.
"Because it’s complacency that has created the environment in which women are sexually assaulted and it’s a ‘conversation’ as opposed to a ‘crime.’ This is not a women’s issue, this is an everybody issue."
He continued that objectifying women in media teaches other men to “see them as objects and treat them as objects,” then added that women “are superior human beings to men.” He closed with a shrug at online pushback: “And I’m sorry if this gets me in trouble with the internet, but f***.”
Gillis described shorts, TikTok filming, and the social rule against looking. Levy described misogyny, objectification, and sexual assault. The gap between those two claims is the entire fight.
One side heard a crude observation about athletic fashion and phone cameras. The other heard an invitation to treat women as disposable. Viewers on Reddit treated the monologue as proof Gillis wants to lead “knuckle dragging” fans. Levy treated silence from other men as the condition that turns assault into a mere “conversation.”
None of the critics quoted in the coverage offered a statement from Gillis, SNL, or NBC walking the jokes back. The record so far is the monologue, the Instagram reel, and the comment threads. The comedian noticed revealing gym clothes and the filming that comes with them. His opponents answered by elevating a clothing joke into a theory of violence.
That leap is now the story. A monologue about shorts was answered with the language of crime and collective male guilt. In today’s comedy climate, the safest stage is the one where no one notices what anyone is wearing, and no one is allowed to say it out loud.
